May the waters of baptism, O Lord,
bring us the new life of your love.

Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.” The Lord God is the source and summit of our faith, the highlight of our day, the way to everlasting salvation. He is God, Creator of Heaven and Earth and all they contain.

Today, maybe John the Baptist calls us to do the same as he did; to let go of our own false Gods and say that the one born in that stable is “more powerful than I am, the straps of his sandals I am not worthy to untie.”  When we do this, we can look at this child in a new way and we can, through him rather than through ourselves, see the true face of God.

How wonderful it would be to do this.

There are ditches and valleys that must be filled with confidence and hope to prepare for Our Lord’s coming.

if we read todays Gospel as the first Christian communities read it, then we truly can “…Stand erect and raise your heads” because the tiny child who will be born into our world in just four weeks is indeed ‘our God’, coming in love, to reveal to us a God of love and to say to us, “I do not call you servants but friends…”;

Jesus is King of all that is, and the Kingdom of God has come and will fully come when Jesus returns… and he will return.